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But even supposing that there were good evidence of the uninterrupted continuity of this type of sepulchre, may not the temples of Chthonian deities have been built on the same plan? The use of the old word μέγαρον suggests that the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, though subterranean, was modelled on the dwellings of men, and, to borrow an argument, religious conservatism may well have preserved for the gods’ abodes the hut-like shape of primitive man’s dwellings long after a new type of house had become general among mortals. Concrete instances of this actually existed in much later times[172]. In Rome the temple of Vesta was of this primitive shape, and so also most probably was the Prytaneum of Athens, which, though not a temple, contained the sacred hearth of the whole community and a statue of Hestia[173]. Demeter then, as one of the deities of primitive Greece, might well have been provided with a temple constructed on the same primitive pattern as that of Vesta, but subterranean, as would befit a Chthonian deity, and thus analogous to the cave wherein she had been wont to dwell. The large domed chamber would be her megaron, wherein her worshippers assembled just as guests assembled in the megaron of a prince. The small square apartment, where such exists, opening on one side of the main room, might be the παστάς or ‘bedchamber,’ an inner sanctuary which temples of later ages also possessed. The approach or ‘dromos’ would represent the natural cave which had given access to her fabled palace in the bowels of the earth.